Calle de San Joaquín

The calle de San Joaquín starts at Fuencarral and ends at the plaza de San Ildefonso, short and slightly crooked. That slant is no whim: the street follows an old medieval road between Madrid and Hortaleza, older than the grid of the Enlightenment. The name arose in the 17th century in the most homespun way. On the façade of the Count of Monterrey’s “casa de la Bolea” hung a small altarpiece of the saint, one of those little shrines that in Habsburg Madrid helped people recognise a corner. The neighbourhood took the reference and it stuck, with no official paper. Nearby, around 1660 the Marquess of Eliche had his garden decorated by two Bolognese painters, old acquaintances of Velázquez: people recalled a painted Atlas bearing a celestial sphere on his shoulders, so well done it looked carved. Through the 19th century it was a street of trades and small life: churro shop, bakery, a café-theatre of light opera. At number 16, in 1911, the Art Nouveau dairy El Descanso opened, decorated after Alfons Mucha’s Seasons; the wrecking crews swept it away in 2007, leaving only the façade standing.